It will be launched at next Friday's grand opening at Copenhagen City Hall, when Hong Kong-born Princess Alexandra oversees the opening celebrations. Instead of snipping a red ribbon, she will be presented with a 30cm square wooden cube with 'Just Breathe It' inside - an installation by Hong Kong student Sam Lo Ming-shum featuring a collection of polythene bags filed with photos of the city and captured 'Hong Kong air'.

This is a feature of a major visual art exhibition at the festival, entitled 'Sars In Asia', and organised by the Hong Kong-based art collective Zuni Icosahedron. A group of 70 Asian figures, including artists, government figures, academics, medical doctors and students from Macau, Taipei, Bangkok and Hong Kong have been asked to create installation works within their own Black Boxes. In the exhibition the boxes will be lined in rows - identical on the inside, but peer in and you'll see a wealth of visual representations and reactions to the atypical pneumonia outbreak.

'I think Sars was, for the world, a reminder that we are all connected,' says IoA festival director, Olaf Gerlach Hansen, who was in town last week to take part in the 'Image Making and Image Makers in Relation to Civil Society In Asia' conference, co-organised by the Conference of Asian Foundations and Organisations and the Hong Kong Institute Of Contemporary Culture.

This isn't the first time the Black Box has made it big. It was a feature at Berlin's 'Vision Festival' in 2000 as a dialogue between German and Hong Kong students. What makes it work, argue the inventors, is the sheer simplicity.

The wooden cube is an installation space, or a 'mini-gallery', explains Wong Yue-wai, the head of the educational branch of Zuni and chief curator of the project in Denmark. It was born in 1995 as a community art project in Sheung Wan, a collaborative concept between Danny Yung, founder of Zuni Icosahedron, Wong Yue-wai and the famed polytechnic professor and art critic Siu King-chung, aka 'King'. It began as a grid of nine, two-metre square black rooms. A cross-section of local artists were invited to fill the spaces with installations, such as Ellen Pau's video art, the comic work of Lai Tat-wing and work by prominent writer Dung Koi-cheung.

'At that time installation art was new to everybody,' remembers Wong. 'We invited students to the show and hosted lectures.'

It soon took off in local schools, sparking some imaginative contributions. Students became the curators and could use anything - materials from their backyards, objects, statues, paintings on the walls. And when they compare their boxes with others, they are not judging their skills or the technique, but entering a discussion of conceptual art.

Such a project immediately seemed the perfect tool for the IoA festival, points out Hansen. 'The art programme of the festival is strong, but we are also focusing on education. That is why Yue-wai is one of the key people we have been working with,' he says. The festival, he continues, is not restrained to theatres and exhibition halls, but saturates the country for two months with conferences, workshops, food festivals, street shows and projects in the media. As the show tours from Copenhagen to Aarhus, Odense, Randers, Skive, Vordingborg, Roskilde and Esbjerg, huge video screens (inspired by the advertising monsters of Asian cities) will be erected on Danish buildings. Speakers will covey the sound along with headphones in cubicles placed on the street. Instead of advertising slogans, images from paintings, films, cartoons and photos from around Asia will stream, in a video collage created by Hong Kong's Zuni, Denmark's The Man With The Video Camera, the India Foundation for the Arts and Taipei's Bamboo Curtain Studio.

'It is to go beyond colonial images of Asia,' says Hansen. 'To go beyond Asia as the immigrant or Asia as the saviour of the world because of its mystical or spiritual values, but to see the reality, the good and the bad, the diversity.'

Phase two is when the Black Box educational project goes into Danish schools. It will act as a handy measure of how successful the festival is in changing people's perceptions. At the start of the festival, 2,500 students will be asked to hunt around their local communities to seek Asian influences in their home towns. They will present their perception of Asia as an installation work in a Black Box. Then they take a photograph of the work and send it to schools dotted around Asia, to be viewed by Asia's youth.

'One of the themes of this festival is reviewing stereotypical images of Asia. The students may have typical images like rice in their boxes at first,' explains Wong. By the end of the seven-week festival, he says, having been exposed to the diverse programmes, the children will produce a second box with their updated perceptions of Asia. These final works will be exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country on September 26, the closing day of the festival.

'We believe in the creativity of the students, as the starting point for everything,' says Hansen. 'The unleashing of creativity is very important in schools. That's how I understand the project's philosophy. The Black Boxes will be themed on Asia, so their understanding, their imagination will come out. It will be very revealing.'